The first snowfall in the city found it unprepared. This wouldn’t happen in Chicago; what’s with the Montrealers? The story of this accident (nobody was hurt) appears on the CBC News; the accident was witnessed by Colin Creado, who works in an office on. . . well, you read the story. A snippet: One by […]

Imagine if a Jew told a true story about how he was brought up by his religious parents and his rabbis to hate Muslims and Palestinians, and then—after reading about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and visiting Palestine—changed his mind and discovered that Muslims (and the country of Palestine) weren’t so bad after all. That would […]

Below is the list of the best books of this year selected by the New York Times; one of them was recommended by Nigel Warburton in his Five Books post about the best popular philosophy books.) If you’ve read any of these, weigh in below. I provide the Times‘s brief synopsis and a link to their reviews. […]

Reader Bruce Lyon sent what he calls a “wood duck fairy tale.” Well, like the old timey fairy tales, it’s not all beer and skittles, but does have a happy ending. And there’s some nice biology included. The story stars a beleaguered mother wood duck (Aix sponsa), some predatory California scrub jays (Aphelocoma californica), and a […]

It’s December 6, National Gazpacho Day—a toothsome soup. It’s also Independence Day in Finland, celebrating its independence from Russia in 1917. On this day in 1768, the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published. 97 years later, the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution, banning slavery, was ratified. On December 6, 1933, a federal judge ruled that […]

Here’s a photo I took at the entrance of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum a few years back. Istanbul is full of cats, and many people, including those who run mosques, take care of them. Thus many of the strays are in good condition. Here’s one worshiping her ancestors:

In these censorious times, made even more censorious by liberals’ counter-reaction to Trump (his election heightened fears by Leftists of more “Islamophobia” and racism), we can expect to see even more calls for bowdlerizing books or removing them from libraries. This is the case with two wonderful books—To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberrry Finn—in some schools in […]

David Sloan Wilson is known as an ardent promoter of group selection, the evolutionary idea that the unit of selection is not the gene or individual, but groups of individuals whose differential extinction and reproduction (group “splitting”) can give rise to traits that are maladaptive within groups, like purely altruistic behavior. (E. O. Wilson, not […]

Okay, I’m running dangerously low, so send in your photos. Today we’re featuring more insect photos from reader Mark Sturtevant, whose comments are indented: This set of pictures marks an important milestone for me, since these are from my first outing last summer where I began to use my newly bought Canon 100mm f/2.8L IS […]

According to CNN, Donald Trump has tapped former neurosurgeon and present-day creationist, Seventh-Day Adventist, believer in Satan, global-warming denialist, and flat-out abortion opponent (including in cases of rape or incest) Ben Carson to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. His job? to “oversee federal public housing programs and helps formulate policy on homelessness and […]